storm in a tea cup

The lightning is forking through the sky, horizontally and looks pink and purple. The trees show the undersides of their leaves as the wind whips around. I sit at my computer with a frightened cat and realise I have no-one to reach out to, no-one at the other side of the screen who is interested any more. I wonder what the chances of being struck by lightning are, more when there actually is a storm out there I suppose?

Is it a hopeful sign that I have not sent this mail to you yet, that there is some kernel, an unexploded popcorn seed of self worth that contains all the pride I have left? My finger hovers over the mouse, wondering which button I will press.

today

I only spill myself when things are shit
When things were good
I wanted to hug them to me,
smile a secret smile
that wasn't so secret
that told everyone
today
I believe in love
and what's more
I believe in myself.
Today I do not

exoskeleton

I need to learn (again) that just because someone acts like they want to be with you, it doesn't mean they really do, or that they are prepared to do anything about it. 


I need to learn not to be so trusting, and not to believe that it means something special and life-changing when someone says "I love you".


Like physics lessons, this is not something I want to learn, I just need to, in order to get where I want in the short term. I want an exoskeleton.

always after...

After my haircut, I have soft fur at the back of my neck.  I can feel his fingers rustling through it, his thumb caressing the fuzzy hollow at the base of my skull.  I see him tilting my face upwards to his, see my face pale and oval, see the dark fringe point to my underwater green eyes.  I see myself from outside and inside and I look pretty.

It isn't real, he isn't here, but he is talking as if that might happen next week, or maybe the week after, although I know my hair will grow and grow straggly before that is real.  I will look in the mirror and the sheeny chocolate colour from the hairdressers will grow dull, and my eyes will not fade but lose the light of belief in my attractiveness.

He tells me he has to go now, his dinner is burning in his kitchen, their kitchen, and though his mind was only just full of me I fade out to a ghost for him then. He does compartmentalise so, although he is drinking vodka at the family table. 

He will catch me later, he says.  I know not to trust too literally in that, I have fallen here before and he stepped away. With my pretty haircut I will not notice the grazed knees, not until after.

testing, testing...

Also at Dark Chaos ;)

yeah talking helps...

He said, I am thinking

about moving

to the other side of the 

world,

She said, it will be

a great opportunity,

and he cried.

If only someone

had said

don't go, I want you

here.

only boring people are bored

I woke up mid afternoon as the sunlight kidney filtered & pale urine coloured tapped at my eyelids.  I got up to do nothing, to be nothing, shrugged the chenille jumper back on and pushed the gap between my first two toes into the flip-flops.

I sagged over this screen to see if you had been thinking of me even though it is a Sunday and I knew you would not, you would be somewhere walking the dog along the beach, no wait, that was in the other house, before you moved to be close to your in-laws and the ready made babysitting facilities.  I still hoped you would think of me but it gets harder to hold a picture of me in your head when real life is happening around you and I am doing nothing, perhaps in suspended animation until you have a fleeting moment to think, to reminisce.

I see the little blobs above the houses and shops when I close my eyes now doing nothing but clicking here, clicking there, clicking where I am told to by the dumb computer game and I accept it and let this limited structure be my life, do as I am allowed as I am expected to do.  Will I take this half promotion which means more work and less recognition, oh yeah sure since you ask, no not nicely just since you ask and I must do that stuff as it would be impolite not to.

I read someone say they had boundaries of tissue paper and I thought of how I do nothing and let tissue paper become my boundaries, build fucking great concrete prisons out of tissue paper, and I did not used to be like this and I am getting worse and worse at hiding it.  Muslin curtains at the windows are enough to seal the world from me.

I sent a message out into the aether, no not to you, to someone who was a distraction from you for a while, an incandescent spark of distraction that is burnt out now because I am so boring and stale.  He used to push me on too, tell me things, say things to me and I drew stuff out of myself to reply, building, pulling and pushing at myself and what I thought were boundaries but now they are not even tissue paper, yesterdays toilet paper and flushed away and I am too far below notice to be worth a reply now.

The sun is going down in a small fizz of light mostly hidden by the metal grey indifferent clouds and the lights in my flat are on and I am opaque to the world outside the windows again.

why not to get back in touch with exes...

poke

poke poke

hey

look at me



ow

I am bitten

censored poets

I have a new poem over there ;)



Censored Poets: Short coming

on waking

I smelt strong this morning, I must have been aroused in the night, in some lost dream.  I wonder who and how.

In between days

He wants 

one thing from me

In between times

I hibernate

for all he knows.

He whispers

wicked words

to wake me.

I want the same thing

from him too, but...

I will always lose

as I want more

than one thing.

I want words

I want whispers

I want wickedness

but most of all

I want not to hibernate.

Irresolution

What to resolve?  Things I should already do but don't?  The daily self-maintenance routine, which basically, I suck at.  Most days I fail to fully complete a routine of toning/moisturising/cleaning teeth/cleaning ears out, weekends I sometimes have a whole day without a bath or a shower.  I could resolve to do more of these things.  

I could resolve to write more, or write better.  I am trying at this.  I could resolve the usual dieting, exercising, taking care of myself stuff.  I am trying at this too, helped by a hangover, they are good for something....  

But it is only a date, and why should a date suddenly make me able to do all these things that I have failed at before.  So this year, again, no resolutions.  A vague hope I will procrastinate less and "accomplish" more, and I guess a good start would be to understand what I would see as an accomplishment...

Too Much

my poem Too Much has been accepted by Shannon Peil for amphibi.us!!!

http://amphibi.us/all/too-much/#comments



1st of the year (although technically it was accepted in 2010, it was in a time zone at least  5hours ahead of me and therefore arrived when I was imbibing ridiculous amounts of wine, and therefore counts as this year)



I would celebrate but I think the two day hangover would carry on then...

too much practice

I cry when I come

too much practice, too little

else, I come alone

mi mi cry

now featured over at The Camel Saloon

click here

leaves, shoots & eats

a new poem over at dark chaos ;)

click click click

46 hours

38 hours, and counting.  A tiring morning, going Christmas shopping.  Wearing the wrong clothes again, my knickers are falling down inside my jeans, I have to periodically back into a corner in the shop, on the street and push my hand past my belt, past the swell of buttocks which you would think are large enough to hold anything up, push my hand down and hoick the offending knickers back up. I think about going into the department store toilets, wondering if it is worth taking them off and going commando?  Inside the store, without all the striding around, they seem to be holding.  I clutch various things to me, they don't seem to go much for shopping baskets in this store, but I make sure they are bought and bagged before I brave the escalator descent.

38 hours, and 2 hours into the shopping, my feet are aching.  Wearing the wrong shoes, or well, maybe the wrong socks. They ruck up under the balls of my feet and my weight falls onto the creases, rubbing, pressurizing the soles.  It hurts and I need to sit down.  I haven't finished the shopping, I know I have missed a couple of people so far, and I know I need to go to the other department store in town.  I decide to treat myself again (yes, the books seem to be all for me, and those other things that seem to have got mixed up with the gifts too) and have lunch out.

38 and a quarter hours and I sit at the table.  Dry mouth, tired.  A glass of wine would be good, and I could have a couple really as they will have worn off by the time I have done the next round of shopping, by the time I would get back into the car. But I am good, I hear my voice tell the waitress "Cola Lite, bitte" and then when the food comes, I pick it up out of the bowl, and my hand shakes.  It is very noticeable when you are eating noodles with chopsticks, they quiver, the sauce spatters off them sporadically.  I bend my head closer to the bowl, try to eat them faster, so I can get home as soon as possible.  The coke is good though, thirst lulling. The chef makes origami swans out of patterned paper, whether he knowingly does it to impress the waitress the result is the same.  They catch me looking at them and think I want to rush off, and come over with the bill.  I smile, I would have liked to stay watching them a little longer, get my notebook out and write about his surprisingly thick fingers and the tiny paper folds.

By the time I leave the restaurant it is 39 hours, but today the wine is already chilling in the fridge and I know I won't even try to resist its call this evening.  I have earned it, I have completed some normal tasks, interacted with the normal world.  I did not have any yesterday.  I have earned it.

Conkers

He thinks that I am something, because of the numbers.  He thinks that because I have a lot of numbers I am a connoisseur. He thinks that piling one on top of the other makes the difference, that the numbers mean something more than experience, something like popularity.  

He must be confusing arithmetics and athletics.  He thinks that the experience is more than hours filled, holes filled, he thinks that each number collected means something adds up in me and I become greater.  He thinks that I have known so much and still I stay with him and that must mean that he is something.  I try not to think of accumulators.

He wants to think that some of my numerical greatness transfers to him when we fuck, but it isn't a game of conkers, he doesn't gain all my numbers plus one if he breaks me, if we break apart and he adjudges himself the winner.

polished?

This week, I wrote in a mail to someone explaining my bulimic writing process.  I'm from the vomit school of writing, I sit down and spew the stuff up, then tidy it up a bit.  Things happen in life, I swallow it all down, and then sick it back up, somewhat selectively.  It's not that life makes me sick, I just react to it stomach first.  My natural inclination is not to polish writing endlessly, to pick the perfect perfect perfect word because near perfect will do for me.  





So I was quite surprised to find how much I enjoyed the polishing up of a haiku series yesterday, adding pictures and creating a new Issuu "publication" for it.  Perhaps there is no thing as too much practice ;)  Click the picture to see the finished result!

A circle of friends

It was a subdued night in the George & Dragon, the drinks were being nursed rather than gulped in deference to just dissolved hangovers, and the conversation was desultory except where it touched on the reality TV programmes.  It was mostly the same crowd that had been there the night before, except Carl and Donna were missing, some problem with one of the kids Donna had told Kate, and she'd told the rest that too.





Kate was quiet too, thinking about the night before, it had been romantically wild and crazy and would have been something to brag about at the pub with the female half of the gang if only she was ten, maybe fifteen years younger.  Back in the days before the gang's relationships coalesced from an amorphous mix of shifting allegiances and suddenly everyone was paired off.  Now that they were grown ups, it wasn't done to keep pulling at the old bonds.





Sometimes those bonds could be recalled with just a glance though.  Last night, Carl had seen the circle of bruises around Kate's wrist when her sleeve had slipped back, but he didn't say anything immediately, waiting for an opportunity that eventually came when they were both waiting to fetch drinks back from the bar.

"Did Daniel do that?" he asked her, touching her wrist under the sleeve.

"Sometimes he can be persuaded," she smiled, and watched his eyes for a reaction, for the old memories to resurface.





The window she'd climbed in through banged in the gusting night.  Carl had sent her a text saying the coast was clear, that Donna had gone back upstairs thinking him passed out in the living room, and when she arrived he had held out his hands to help her over the wet sill.  A dramatic heavy night, dark with expectancy, the thunder and rain appearing with perfect scenic timing as she arched her back on top of him, on the sofa.  The lightening heralding the next rumble froze the image of her hand across his mouth, pale with painted nails that looked almost black in the stark flash.  His arms darker than hers reached, gripped her waist, helped the rhythm build.  She'd lifted her hand off his face, allowed him to moan when the thunder cracked and rebounded around the room, squeezing it back when the sound faded.  She'd forgotten that he was so much bigger than Daniel, and that riding him like that pushed his cock into her so deep, almost too deep.





There was little enough time afterwards for her to stay in the circle of his arms, she hadn't been sure if she really wanted to anyway, a small taste of comfort and nostalgia went a long way.  It had been enough to keep her from the chill of the short walk home, the streetlights glimmered coldly off of the windswept puddles.  Into the stone flagged back yard from the alley, pulling the wet things off of the washing line, an excuse for having been outside.





Daniel was waiting for her in the kitchen.